BT Pledged On Extra £1bn To Super-Fast Broadband Infrastructure

Posted on: 14 May 2010

By:Patrick Oliphant

BT (British Telecom) is the UKs largest telecom provider and it is one of those companies that you would love to hate but you can’t, because from time to time they do or say something that causes you to love or hate them all over again. This week BT pledged to spend an extra £1bn pounds to bring super-fast broadband to UK homes; this is one of those occasions.

This announcement is part of an ongoing plan by BT, Virgin Media and the Government to improve Britain’s home to internet broadband infrastructure, and to put British homes internet access in line with the rest of Europe and the world.

The previous Labour Government before the election revealed plans on how they planned to achieve this but now that they are no longer in power and the then opposition party did not agreed with the plans, we are yet to hear from them what their plans are.

Currently Britain logs behind many country in terms of broadband speed and especially for those in rural areas some of which are still using dial-up. For many city homes connection is better and most of the suppliers have concentrated on this area, it is okay but still not good enough. The overall plan is to give homes and local businesses access to download speeds of up to 40Mbit/s and upload speed of up to 2Mbit/s.

The upgrade of the broadband infrastructure has been going on for some time now and many parts of the country are beginning to experience better connection speed, as part of a trial. Areas like Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch, South Wales have already had their infrastructure upgraded.

BT has already committed £1.5bn on the project which should give 40 per cent of the UK homes access to this ultra-fast broadband by 2012. This week’s announcement is an additional amount to complete the rest of the UK.